In November, Coming Home began a monthly award, the Golden Coconut, an award for the coconut pro-abortion apologists who spout the most anti-scientific nonsense in the headlong pursuit of butchering babies.

There has been one individual within the Catholic Church who is deserving of the December AND the Year-End Award, and that is Sister Carol Keehan, a member of the Daughters of Charity.

Sr. Keehan has had herself a banner year. She gave political cover to politicians on voting for Obamacare, rode to the defense of another sterling woman religious, Sister McBride, who has been presiding over a hospital that aborts babies in the case of rape, incest and the “mental health” of the mother (which means anything that might be on the stress scale at all). Keehan also defends McBride’s governance which includes sterilizations of men and women, and the prescribing of all manner of contraceptives, many of which are abortifacients.

In statements defending Catholic Healthcare West, of which St. Joseph’s in Phoenix is a member, Keehan stated:

“They carefully evaluated the patient’s situation and correctly applied the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services to it, saving the only life that was possible to save,” and that CHW and St. Joseph’s were “well-known” for a “long and stellar history in the protection of life at all stages.”

Even though she was head of the Catholic Health Association, a political lobby group, before 2009 Sr. Keehan was relatively unimportant.

Then Sr. Keehan, as an exponent of the Magisterium of Nuns facing off against the Catholic Bishops, gave cover to “catholic” pro-abortion politicians to vote in favor of legislation that would ultimately provide taxpayer money for abortions.

But this honor NCR is giving to Sr. Keehan isn’t really about her opposing bishops or bishops’ conferences.

This isn’t really about nuns being persecuted by a Vatican investigation.

This isn’t really about the conflict between women and bishops or women’s roles.
This certainly isn’t about compassion for the poor, or health care.

Sr. Keehan’s award is about abortion, and bringing the abortion business into “catholic” hospitals.

NCR is offering Sr. Carol Keehan as the acceptable Catholic face, the poster person, for compassionate access to abortion for poor women.

NCR honors Sr. Keehan because this year she did more than anyone else to change the perception that Catholics must oppose abortion.

Quite a legacy.

Quite a legacy indeed. For her efforts, Coming Home joins the National Catholic Distorter in recognizing Sr. Keehan’s life’s work. For her untiring defense of those who strike at the child of the womb, for her consistency in striking at the Bishops and undercutting their authority, for misrepresenting public policy and Canon Law, for leading souls astray via her shadow magisterium, it is the responsibility of Coming Home to award her the highest distinction it can bestow on a leader in the Culture of Death,

The Golden Coconut Award.

The great solace for the Church and the Culture of Life is that orders such as Keehan’s will cease to exist in another fifteen years, as most of their members will have died off, and the remaining will be very old and in retirement and nursing homes. Young, vibrant and faithful communities are springing up in their place and renewing the Church landscape.

Rebellion and death are hardly the stuff of vocations posters. Young women with a love of the Lord don’t want to sign on to community life with a bunch of angry old women. Keehan and her ilk are living anachronisms. Their rebellion, their pro-abortion advocacy is part of a feminist rage at perceived inequity because of a male-only priesthood. It is a quid pro quo with the lives of babies, and the spiritual and psychological welfare of the mothers whom they lead astray.

They are angry women, whose sin of anger leads them into a scorched earth campaign.

Along with her Golden Coconut comes sincere prayers for her conversion of heart and reconciliation with the Bishops whom she has repeatedly struck with wicked claw.

The recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has triggered alarm among various quarters for his self-professed admiration of health care rationing as seen in other countries such as Britain’s National Health Service. The issue here moves well past the politics and begs the question: How have we as a society become so deadened to the value of human life, that in our abundance of wealth and blessing from God we could seriously entertain the word “rationing” as applied to health care for our elders, for the poorest among us?

This move is a game-changer on so very many levels. Juxtaposed with the almost weekly reports of breakthroughs in cancer therapy, treatment of chronic conditions and adult stem cell therapies, this is not only an odd moment for considering rationing health care, but a dire threat to the advancement of science. A society that commits itself to death as a solution to its self-inflicted financial wounds cannot long endure as a pioneer of extending and improving the quality of life through research in the biomedical sciences; not when the government that funds such research is busy eliminating the need for it.

So how did we get here?

Twenty years ago when I was studying and working as a psychiatric research assistant at Columbia University, I was invited by one of the faculty to attend a talk being given by a medical economist. The topic was the new system of managed care and HMOs. In this talk, the economist made a very prescient observation that I took as a harbinger. He said that increased access to high quality health care does not make for a healthier population. It creates a larger, more chronically ill population of people who will exceed the lifespan dictated by their illness by twenty to thirty years.

Consider those who undergo coronary bypass surgery, who have pacemakers, treatments for cardiac dysrhythmias, diabetes, HIV, hypertension, vascular disease, COPD, cancer, etc. Advances in medical treatments and access to those treatments produces a population who live decades longer, mostly by taking medications daily. The longer we live, the greater the likelihood of new conditions arising needing surgical and medical interventions. All of this costs money.

The economist went further. Are we prepared to extend social security benefits to an ever-burgeoning population of retirees? Can the civil servant pension systems cope with people who retire after twenty years in their early forties and collect pensions well into their eighties and nineties? What do we expect from managed care?

Two decades later we are now being forced to address these questions. It seems that death is being proffered as the solution. Ridding ourselves of the elderly not only saves Medicare dollars, but also saves social security dollars as well as civil servant pension payouts. Cutting Medicaid services also saves on welfare and related money. Such solutions to vexing financial difficulties requires little intellect and even less heart and soul.

Death is cheap and easy.

The coarsening that has led us down this path began with the sexual revolution and legalization of abortion. Mother Teresa of Calcutta cut straight to the heart of the issue when she stated that it is a poverty that a child must die so that we may live as we wish. That has been the great selling point of abortion, that babies are an economic encumbrance that will hold us back from being and doing all that we wish to be and do.

The coarsening continued to unfold with the “Death with Dignity” movement, which really appeals to the same obsessive need for radical control and moral autonomy that has gripped us ever tighter during the past five decades of the sexual revolution. Now we have a political appointee whose duties could foreseeably include saving the nation money by institutionalizing a system of treatment refusals that make the worst of the HMOs pale in comparison.

In Immunology, the process of opsonization – the marking of a pathogen for destruction – has its etymology in the Greek word meaning “to mark for death.”

We opsonize the unborn, the poor, the elderly. With the steady rise in autism diagnoses, which are breaking the backs of school districts across the country (one out of every 110 children), will we return to eugenic sterilization that is still Constitutional Law, enshrined in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision?

We cannot absolve ourselves of culpability in this trajectory toward the Culture of Death. Pope Paul VI warned us of this in Humanae Vitae back in 1968. Pope John Paul II warned us repeatedly for over twenty-five years in all of his writings, in which he gave us the roadmap, philosophically and theologically, back to a Culture of Life.

We should not deceive ourselves: The raised issue of health care rationing represents significant momentum for the Culture of Death that will require a muscular response to slow, halt and reverse. We need to become very vocal in our affirmation of life in all of its stages. We are in dire straits, but we have all the answers before us, and all of the graces of Heaven for the asking.

“Throughout history, executive orders have carried the full force and effect of law and have served as an important means of implementing public policy. Perhaps the most famous executive order was the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. More recently, in 2007, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13435, restricting embryonic stem-cell research. This executive order protected the sanctity of life and was “applauded” and “welcomed” by pro-life advocates. That these same people would now claim that President Obama’s executive order maintaining the sanctity of life is not worth the paper it is written on is disingenuous at best.”

This is representative of the theme running through his article. Black Bart isn’t trying to deceive us so much as he is trying to deceive himself. The two executive orders quoted differ from the one he sought, and gained, in that they did not attempt to nullify existing law-a process Constitutionally reserved to the legislature and the courts.

In the case of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln recognized that an executive order could NOT override the Constitution by freeing slaves in states of the Union, such as Maryland and Kentucky, as these were Constitutionally guaranteed rights. However, in his Constitutional capacity of Commander-in-Chief he reasoned that the Confederate States, having seceded, had no claim upon the U.S. Constitution, and therefore no rights. The EP only freed slaves of the Confederacy as a means of depriving the CSA of their labor base.

Therefore, Stupak gets it badly wrong on the EP as an executive order.

In the stem cell ban, President Bush was blazing new territory, and was ahead of the Congress on this issue. There was no Congressional law being abrogated, no Constitutional right being abrogated. Bush wasn’t addressing the legality of ESC research, but only what the Federal Government was willing to pay for.

Again, Stupak gets it badly wrong.

Black Bart voted in favor of Hillary Clinton’s initiative to broaden American-sponsored abortion in third world nations. He voted twice to block bills that would defund Planned Parenthood.

He came to this issue with blood all over his hands. He announced last November that he would vote for Obama’s bill with or without anti-abortion language. In so doing, he signaled Obama that there was no real principled opposition to the final vote. In our hearts, we were desperate for someone, ANYONE, to block this legislation, in part because of its sponsorship of abortion. We hoped and prayed that even one with blood on his hands would possibly come to his senses.

We were wrong.

We were wrong to vest so much faith in such a man (though not wrong to hope).

What did we learn? We learned that there is no such thing as a pro-life block in the Democrat Party worth courting or cultivating. They simply used our time and dissipated our energies. Raw power is all they know, or respect. They need to experience the raw power of the electorate come November.

The Republicans are only marginally better. However, they will in all likelihood be given another chance at power. If they blow it this time, they’ll be in the wilderness for a very long time.

Black Bart has betrayed us all, especially his Catholic roots. Worst of all, he betrayed himself.

I pray that this man lives a VERY long life, well into his nineties, to see and loathe the evil that he has helped to unleash, and which was his to stop. When he finally meets Jesus, I pray for him the mercy that he has denied for countless babies who will be slaughtered because of this man’s votes.

Like this:

In a town hall meeting in his home district, Stupak announced that even if his amendment failed, he would vote for the health care bill.

So, if he could leverage anti-abortion language, he would. If he couldn’t, rather than force a failure on Obama and a return to the bargaining table, Stupak announced that he was not very serious about abortion all along.

Like this:

The parallels between Bart Stupak’s conduct in this drama and that of Pontius Pilate are strikingly similar. The protestations of no fault in he intended victim. The faux reluctance to be manipulated into pronouncing a capital sentence on the innocent. The implicit threats of riotous discord and resultant loss of office.

The washing of the hands.

Giving in and assuaging one’s conscience by rationalizations of proportional goods in exchange for ‘lesser’ injustices. The belief that it’s really all for the best.

The coward’s collapse.

One didn’t become a Roman Governor by virtue of his humanitarian proclivities. They were brutal men who ruled through intimidation and fear. Similarly, one doesn’t rise through the ranks of the modern Democrat Party at the national level by voting in favor of the defenseless among us. These are brutal people with the blood of over fifty million citizens on their hands.

Just as with Pilate’s grotesque mockery of justice, Stupak gave us quite a show, didn’t he? An aberration? Not exactly. Stupak has a spotted voting record on the life issues. About 80% favorable. However, when he has voted pro-death, they have been monumental votes.

Twice Stupak voted against bills that would deny funding to Planned Parenthood, the single-largest chain of abortion providers in the nation.

Thus, he showed that he approved of federal dollars that support abortion.

He voted in favor of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (Office for Global Women’s Issues), which established a global infrastructure for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to push forward a robust abortion agenda, tying U.S. foreign aid to the requirement that countries pass laws establishing ‘abortion rights’.

More Federal funding for abortion.

Then came tonight’s vote, justified by the tissue-thin lie that President Obama would craft an Executive Order prohibiting Federal funding of abortion, an executive order that all know to be completely without merit legally.

It was a good show. A Lenten Passion Play with the lives of our children.

“I listened to you and took a common-sense approach to improve the bill. Now it lowers costs for families and small business, protects Medicare, finally guarantees coverage for pre-existing conditions and reduces the deficit. And it’s not run by the government. I’m convinced this is right for Nebraska.”

No mention of government funding for abortion in exchange for all of that in a bill that 65% of Americans dislike anyway. What Nelson doesn’t get is that people have a principled opposition to abortion. This Christmas wish list of goodies will only serve to enrage people further, as their integrity is held in contempt.

A picture tells a thousand words. Honest Leadership. Open Government. Words emblazoned in the background and foreground. Politicians do this when their actions are deceitful and dishonest. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

This is the Party that literally changed the locks and would not permit Republican participation in the process, who hold votes in the middle of the night, who bribe, and now according to LifeNews.com are attempting to make Medicare death panels a permanent fixture by using language that would prohibit future sessions of the House and Senate from overturning the legislation.

Now will Americans get it? This is a political party literally drunk with blood. Death is their answer to everything. November can’t come soon enough.